Drive-by, low-quality comment:

Herb is great. Glad he's thinking about this. C++ syntax is garbage and needs help, but why deviate so much from existing syntax? Why drop curly braces? The decision to allow mixing new/old C++ syntax in the same file seems like a gross mistake that prevents a more incremental fix of the language. Why the heck doesn't it support defining classes yet? Is it because of the aforementioned requirement to intermix new/old syntax?

I hope efforts like this continue, as we all know something is broken in C++ syntax. I think it can be fixed with tweaks and some breaking of backwards compatibility in the same source module.